Blog Archives

After submitting last month’s #Meme15 blog post, brought to you by MVP Jason Strate (blog | twitter), I thought I would continue this blogging fun.

This month’s topic: How do you balance mixing family, friends, peers, and co-workers on Facebook?

Striking a balance on Facebook is a difficult task, at least for me. At my last position, many of my co-workers were neighbors and friends before they were co-workers. However, at my current position I knew no one prior to starting and sometimes letting people into your private life can be risky. Therefore, I guarded my private life as it takes time to trust co-workers and allow them into your inner circle. Facebook, for me, is more personal than my other social networking presences. With those, I am more comfortable communicating professionally in the social arena.

Once you are in my Facebook realm, there is still a bit of a balancing act. How should I interact with friends, family, high school classmates, college buddies, previous co-workers, and acquaintances from interactions with my children (parents of other kids that played football, baseball, basketball, softball, community theatre, and band with my children)? For example, I publish this SQL Server blog to my Facebook account and I know most of those friends are clueless about SQL Server, but I don’t always post technical blogs. Hopefully, they will get something out of my non-technical posts.

Also, I used to play games on Facebook, before I realized it was sucking my will to live: Farmville and Mafia Wars were consuming me and all of my time. If I am going to play games, I might as well use my PS3 for real gaming. I did find it interesting how upset people would get when you sent them game requests when they did not play that game and they were not capable of block them automatically.

At this point in my life, I pretty much only share pictures and great moments on Facebook in addition to my love of humor, Star Wars, SQL Server, and the Florida Gators. If you are one of the 368 friends on Facebook, you either enjoy my geekiness and sarcasm or you subscribe to the theory of keep you friends close and your enemies closer. In that case, I hope my geekiness will annoy those enemies. :-p

Oh LinkedIn how I love thee, let me count the ways! Sorry, I still have Valentine’s Day stuck in my head thanks to those 75% off candy sales today. Focus. I have a LinkedIn profile with my resume posted. In addition, I have connected with present and former colleagues and some of my SQL Server friends. I have also requested and received recommendations from some of those colleagues to try to give my profile a completeness to it.

It hasn’t always been that way. Before I attended Mark Tabladillo‘s “Social Marketing 2011 for Microsoft Professionals” presentation at SQL Saturday #86, I did not have my full resume on my profile as I was leery for some unknown reason. I have my resume on Monster, but something didn’t feel right, maybe it was the social aspect to the site. After Mark told us that nearly 2/3 of all hiring was done through LinkedIn last year, I was blown away. I went home and updated my profile that night.

In addition to the profile, I post my professional blog postings to my LinkedIn profile so that if I am ever in need of another position, there will be a rich amount of professional information available to potential employers. At this point, I do not know whether this is a successful endeavor, but I hope to one day update this blog entry one way or the other.